rel=canonical

and I put a canonical URL to the first page on pages 2, 3 and 4, will this mean that any external links pointing to pages 2, 3 or 4 will have any impact on the pagerank of the first page?

Hope that makes sense

BIOSTALL

joebert

Fart Bubbles

Posts: 13506

Loc: Florida

3+ Months Ago

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nical.html

Quote:

Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

BIOSTALL

Graduate

Posts: 125

Loc: UK

3+ Months Ago

Cheers Joebert (again)

I did read that page but must of missed that part.

joebert

Fart Bubbles

Posts: 13506

Loc: Florida

3+ Months Ago

Perhaps you were searching the comments like I did at first. I didn't catch it until I was just about to give up.

bermuda

Graduate

Posts: 144

3+ Months Ago

Hey folks, are using the canonical attributes really necessary? I mean, it is not that vital anyway.

joebert

Fart Bubbles

Posts: 13506

Loc: Florida

3+ Months Ago

bermuda wrote:

Hey folks, are using the canonical attributes really necessary? I mean, it is not that vital anyway.

What makes you say that ?

bermuda

Graduate

Posts: 144

3+ Months Ago

Well, you know I have seen a lot of top ranking blogs which are powered using the latest version of WordPress and the canonical plugin has not been installed.

They are doing just fine with no problem. You know, I feel like using or not using the option may not bring that much difference in maintaining of the sites. Please let me know if you have some advanced points as I really like to know further in this regard.

joebert

Fart Bubbles

Posts: 13506

Loc: Florida

3+ Months Ago

Are these blogs producing multiple URLs which point to the same pages ? If the answer is no, then there indeed wouldn't be any need to use a canonical meta element. It would not make any difference.

But what about a situation like I had recently, where my index was being redirected to "index.php", then some time down the road it was changed to "index.html" to reflect a change in the sites cache system. There were already links pointing to the "index.php" page. A few pages on the site still generated a link pointing to the PHP version, and still do because I haven't found them yet.

In that situation, I could go around and pester someone in every single place the wrong links was at, and I could spend longer than I need to searching for strange regular expression using grep.

It was a lot easier to just stick that canonical element in there and not stress over it, making the changes at my own pace.

Another thing to consider was, setting up 301 redirects from the php to html versions of the page would have been complicated. The site actually generates the page using "index.php", and when a request is made for "index.html" a cache folder is checked for the html page before passing the request off to index.php in the background.

bermuda

Graduate

Posts: 144

3+ Months Ago

Thank you for clarification points as the case is now 100% clear for me. It's always great talking to the old hands on this board.